As Immigrants Settle Beyond City Limits, Help Is Hard to Find

José was looking for peace and quiet, in addition to work, when he decided to settle in the hinterlands of upstate New York 14 years ago. “A lot of farmland and trees,” he recalled, speaking in Spanish. “It reminded me of my village in Mexico.”

But he quickly learned that being poor and undocumented and living far from the well-established immigrant networks found in the nation’s big cities made life especially difficult. There was the absence of public transportation (he cannot legally drive), the scarcity of lawyers with immigration expertise and a feeling of isolation fed by his inability to speak English and the lack of opportunities to learn it.

“It’s a big challenge,” said José, 38, who works on a dairy farm in Livingston County, where he lives with his wife and four children, about 230 miles from New York City. “We’re a forgotten community in terms of service.” (He asked that his last name not be published because of his immigration status.)

Such challenges are a fact of life for the large and growing population of immigrants across the country who have bypassed traditional gateway cities like New York and San Francisco to settle instead in suburban and rural areas.

In 2013, about 61 percent of foreign-born residents of the nation’s most-populous metropolitan areas lived in the suburbs, up from 56 percent in 2000, according to the Brookings Institution. In New York State, the foreign-born population living outside New York City has more than doubled since 1990 and now stands at about 1.3 million people, according to the latest Census Bureau figures.

Yet the kinds of services that immigrants rely on — low-cost legal help, language classes, interpretation and public transportation — have not kept pace with demand and remain disproportionately concentrated in big cities, scholars and immigrant advocates say.

Now, those who work with immigrants are trying to boost such services as federal officials prepare to put President Obama’s latest immigration initiatives, which could help an estimated four million people, into action.

“I worry about people falling through the cracks,” said Emma Kreyche, an organizing and advocacy coordinator at the Worker Justice Center of New York, a group that provides legal representation and advocacy for agricultural and other low-wage workers across the state. “There are a lot of gaps.”

The struggle for recent arrivals to this country has been particularly extreme in rural areas, many of which have been revitalized by the newcomers even if their presence has not always been embraced.

“Immigrants provide a lifeline to dying communities,” said Daniel T. Lichter, a sociology professor at Cornell University and director of the Cornell Population Center. “Yet there is not often an infrastructure available to accommodate new immigrants and make social integration easier for them.”

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José, a 38-year-old immigrant farm worker in upstate Livingston County, came to the area 14 years ago. “It’s a big challenge,” he said. “We’re a forgotten community in terms of service.”CreditBrendan Bannon for The New York Times

The shortage of services was felt acutely last year amid a surge in the illegal migration of unaccompanied children from Central America, many of whom were detained at the border and placed into deportation proceedings before being released to relatives. Of those children bound for the New York metropolitan region, the vast majority settled in places outside New York City.

The families of dozens of those children have turned to Ms. Kreyche and her colleagues for help, especially in navigating the legal system. But their office, in Kingston, is not equipped to represent immigrants fighting deportation, and such help is scarce elsewhere in the region.

As a result, many of her clients have had to travel far afield, mostly to New York City, about 100 miles away, to find private lawyers experienced in handling deportation cases.

Some of Ms. Kreyche’s clients, overwhelmed by the challenge of navigating the system alone, frustrated by the difficulty of getting to court or distracted by what she called “other survival concerns,” simply fail to appear for their court dates “and just disappear,” she said.

The immigration initiatives announced by President Obama in November would grant temporary legal status to parents of American-born children and expand an existing program that defers deportation of some immigrants brought to America as children. The measures have spurred new collaborations between advocates and service providers, who are preparing strategies designed to reach the greatest number of candidates.

“We’re facing a situation where we have to get the services out there now,” said Camille J. Mackler, director of legal initiatives for the New York Immigration Coalition.

In interviews, several immigrants living in remote parts of New York described the trouble they had faced trying to settle into their adopted communities.

Carina Diaz, 31, who emigrated from Mexico in 2005 and lives in Genesee County, said that until recently, her children’s schools neither provided translators for parent-teacher conferences nor translated important documents into Spanish.

“I would say, ‘What’s this say?’ “ Ms. Diaz recalled in Spanish. “ ‘I want to participate in the school!’ “ Other immigrant parents, she said, chose not to make such demands for fear of retribution. “The parents don’t want to say anything because they don’t want anything done against their kids,” she said.

While some schools in her area had begun to provide interpreting services, she said, there were still no low-cost or free English as a second language classes available for adults. “Many people want to take them but there aren’t any,” she said.

Her concerns were underscored by a recent report from the Center for an Urban Future, a research group based in New York City. The report found that the number of seats in state-funded English as a second language classes in the state had declined by 32 percent from 2005 to 2013.

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Emma Kreyche, who also works for Worker Justice Center of New York, at a store in Kingston.CreditNiko J. Kallianiotis for The New York Times

“While immigrants represent a growing slice of the work force throughout the state and have the potential to provide an economic spark to many upstate cities, the state’s investment in programs that help newcomers learn English has failed to keep pace,” the report said. “Such an investment would provide a key lift for immigrants, aid employers around the state who are increasingly hiring immigrants and deliver significant economic benefits to the state’s economy.”

Other immigrants spoke about the difficulties of getting around without driver’s licenses, relying in part on costly private car services.

The lack of mobility has forced service providers and advocates outside major cities to be more proactive, visiting farmworkers in their homes, churches and other places where they feel comfortable gathering.

“We drive a lot,” said Carly Fox, a legal rights advocate with the Worker Justice Center’s office in Rochester. “It’s a big state.”

The scarcity of immigrant services in suburban and rural parts of the state is partly the product of misperception, advocates say: Government agencies, foundations and others who provide financing for such services have not fully realized that immigrants are a significant and needy presence in these areas.

“There are misconceptions about the suburbs, that they’re bedroom communities and everybody works in the city,” said Pat Young, the program director for the Central American Refugee Center, a legal services and advocacy group based in Hempstead, N.Y. “Well, the majority of Long Islanders work in Long Island, which is why a lot of immigrants are moving here.”

Mr. Young said that the ignorance was highlighted last year during the unaccompanied minors surge, when, he said, some public officials in Nassau County seemed perplexed about why so many of the children were headed there. (Long Island has one of the largest Central American populations of any region in the country.)

New York State sought to address some of the shortfall in services in 2013 by creating the Office for New Americans, which provides assistance to immigrants through 27 centers around the state, including free English classes, help with naturalization, free legal consultations and support for entrepreneurs.

While applauding the agency’s work, advocates said it had made just a dent in the services-supply problem and they have pushed to increase its legal staff and the capacity of its language program, among other needs. In his executive budget this year, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo proposed to nearly double state financial support for the office, which was designated an executive agency by legislation passed last year.

José, the dairy farm worker in Livingston County, said he wished the local community and its public officials were more enthusiastic about the immigrant population’s presence.

“We are people who aren’t doing anything bad,” he said. “We came to work and we pay taxes, we’re contributing to the economy of the country.” And despite all the challenges, he said, “we like to be here.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: As Immigrants Settle Beyond City Limits, Help Is Hard to Find. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe